"There is no point in asking which came first, the educational explosion of the
last one hundred years or the management that put this knowledge to productive use. Modern
management and modern enterprise could not exist without the knowledge base that developed
societies have built. But equally, it is management, and management alone, that makes
effective all this knowledge and these knowledgeable people. The emergence of management
has converted knowledge from social ornament and luxury into the true capital of any
economy."

Peter Drucker (1989)

Organizations are in the midst of adapting to enormous changes brought about by
technological breakthroughs in computers and communication. Accelerated particularly by
continuing developments in collaborative technologies known as "groupware,"
these breakthroughs are having a profound impact on the management process. They are also
stimulatingin this, the "Network Era," as it has been dubbed by leading
scholars (Nolan & Croson, 1995)a transition from a hierarchical to a virtual
workplace. In the latter, dispersed team members from multiple disciplines work
cooperatively to adapt to competitive situations (Townsend, DeMarie, & Hendrickson,
1998). They communicate via electronic meetings, which have become commonplace in our
intensely competitive and global marketplace. At the heart of these new, team-based
information systems is the objective of capturing, organizing, and distributing the
intellectual capital of the firm for which the team members work. Academicians describe
this process as "knowledge management" (Cole, 1998).

The knowledge management movement creates new challenges and
opportunities for the field of professional education, which would do well to develop an
educational equivalent to the virtual workplace. The rapid expansion of the
Internet as a potential course delivery platform, combined with the increasing interest in
life-long learning, has created a significant opportunity for graduate programs to adapt
to technological advances. Responding to these advances, however, will require a rigorous
reexamination of the traditional university's bricks-and-mortar delivery system. This
article examines how traditional universities can enrich the student learning
experienceand become more responsive to stakeholdersby developing what I call
a "virtual knowledge network."

Professional Education Programs

Corporate, government, and non-profit agencies spend hundreds of millions of dollars
each year on formal education programs for management personnel. These programs range from
short, single-subject seminars to complete management degree programs. Agency employees
take almost all of these courses in some form of "limited residency" so that
they may still fulfill their responsibilities in their respective organizations. As
part-time students, the managers-in-training move back and forth between the culture of
industry and that of the classroom, where they develop new relationships with people from
other disciplines and firms. Graduates of these programs often attribute much of their
learning to their interactions with classroom peers, and they often attempt to maintain
peer relationships throughout their careers.

In many ways, the environment of these management training programs is analogous to
that of the virtual workplace. Consider, for example, the fact that many agency-sponsored
education programs rely heavily on case method teachinga form of instruction that
requires students to prepare for class in study group meetings. Often the topic at these
meetings is a case analysis task, an assignment in which students must examine a given
problem and recommend a course of corrective action within a limited time frame. Each
student brings his/her own unique expertise to the analysis, which is then critiqued in
class by the instructor and often by professional guest speakers. Thus, like the
multi-discipline, virtual teams operating in today's professional organizations, these
student groups are shaped by the individual members' skills and by input from
knowledgeable sources.

The Need for Information Technology Tools

It is important to recognize, however, that professional education classrooms also
differ significantly from the virtual workplace. Electronic meetings, for example, are
rare; communication between instructors and students remains largely face-to-face in
scheduled locations, at scheduled times. Moreover, instructors employ technology tools
much less frequently than do members of virtual work teams. Despite a rapidly growing
investment in the Information Technology infrastructure of most management schools (Green,
1998), new IT is not being integrated into the learning process. This is a foolish
omission, for research shows that collaborative technologies can improve the quality of
learning (Morrissey, 1997).

The new availability of digital content provides an excellent example of how
professional management programs could be enhanced by IT. [Can
you explain in simple terms what a digital document database is?]Many
textbook publishers, academic journals, and university libraries are now utilizing digital
document databases, which allow even the individual classroom instructor to custom publish
educational materials and circulate them among dispersed students. Similarly, Internet
software developers are introducing low cost, video and audio transmission tools which
provide access to "same time, different place" meetingssuch as lectures at
distant universities and on-line conferences.

Digital databases and video transmission tools: these are only two examples of
collaborative technologies that enable universities to extend their educational
"reach." If management universities take advantage of these tools and establish
a "virtual knowledge network" for their client base of current students, alumni,
and corporate partners, the traditional classroom will be transformed into a virtual
learning space free from the confines of a physical classroom.

The Virtual Knowledge Network [This whole section should
be more detailed since it is the focus of your article]

Figure
1 depicts a scenario for this new virtual knowledge network. As resident class meetings
become less frequent and students are recruited from wider geographic areas, faculty will
become the primary drivers of the establishment of virtual classrooms. They will assume
the role of true knowledge managers and facilitate "knowledge groups," a new
form of the traditional study group (Brufee, 1993).

Participants in the network will purchase course materials and related documents
through electronic commerce. The cost of student access to the network will be included in
tuition; alumni and corporate partners will provide financial support through annual
subscriptions.

Online "communities of scholars" will be created from a broad base of
university stakeholders.[Needs elaboration.]

The Virtual Knowledge Network in Practice: A Scenario

Imagine that Cathy, a 35 year-old marketing manager from an early stage pharmaceutical
firm, is a student in Professor M's class. Cathy has worked in marketing for 12 years; she
started as a sales representative in a major medical firm after earning a bachelor's
degree in economics. She has been with her current firm for the past 8 years and has been
given increasingly complex responsibilities in product management. Cathy's current job
assignment is to coordinate a team that will be responsible for launching a new product
about to be approved by the FDA.

Cathy attends school every other Saturday and is a member of a study group comprised of
other students as well as an alumnus [of the university
organizing her class? or the local university? --they might be different institutions!]
and the director of technology planning from a local firm, both of whom participate in the
group's online discussions. She is also a member of a five-person group working on a[collaborative] thesis project [they all create one thesis?] that is one of their
degree requirements. Professor M mentions that the university's executive program has had
a number of pharmaceutical industry students; one of these former students, who was
recently named CEO of a new venture in the industry, spoke to his class last year. After
searching the university knowledge base [is this base
something that already exists in universities? or something that would be created in the
new VKNs? If the latter, please supply some detail about what kind of information it
would contain. Perhaps you could do that in the section titled "Virtual
Knowledge Networks."]and identifying this individual, Cathy invites
him to participate in the thesis group's electronic meetings. He, in turn, provides Cathy
with access to his firm's monthly "open forum" Web conference, which is designed
to keep clients informed about product developments.

Through her database search, Cathy's also finds a faculty member who is a consultant on
FDA regulations and a student in another class who is writing a paper on the performance
of emerging drug companies. She even discovers that the university's law school
provides access to a Web conference on new advertising regulations in the pharmaceutical
industry. Cathy shares this last piece of information with her colleagues at work, which
leads them to explore a wider use of Internet conferencing.

This brief scenario highlights the way in which, through the use of IT tools,
university management programs can offer professional students and instructors access to
rich information flows and knowledge sources.

Conclusion

To utilize information technologies to enhance the educational needs of the
professional student, universities will have to undertake dramatic transformations in
organizational structure and processes. University executives would do well to follow the
example of selected industries that have been through the same transformative process and
successfully developed virtual workteams (Weill, 1998). [I
edited this sentence; does the Weill citation still apply?] Administrators
must be receptive to change and approach curriculum structure and delivery systems with a
"clean slate" mentality. They must find a way to enable and encourage alumni to
remain part of the university "community" long after they have graduated. And
they must allow faculty to be at the heart of this transformation, acting as
"knowledge managers" in a new structure which transcends time and space in order
to serve a broader and more technologically-savvy constituency.Universities that recognize
the strategic opportunity to implement virtual knowledge networks will enjoy a significant
competitive advantage in the next century.

The article is well written and will be useful. The author does a nice job of
presenting a concrete example for faculty and placing it within a broader societal
context.

U
I would recommend that this only be published with extensive revisions. The writing is
poor: ungrammatical, and vague and verbose in places where it should, and could, be
succinct and specific. The subject matter is a worthy one; I suggest it be extensively
rewritten and resubmitted.

NA well-written article. I disagree with the veiled assertion that higher
education lags significantly behind the private and government sectors in promoting
knowledge communities. No segment really uses knowledge communities in an exemplary
manner, as everyone is still experimenting with the concept. I'm also not certain how the
mini-case about Cathy highlights a situation that differs much from what most graduate
students can experience today with the technologies that are employed in most graduate
professional programs. What I think is important here is the opportunity to link graduate
students to the private sector, to alumni, and to other contacts as part of their
education. This is a more a pedagogical issue than a technological one.